NUCLEAR-TO-NATURE LAND CONVERSION

ABSTRACT

Postnuclear land conversion has gained attention as more civilian nuclear power reactors reach their design life. To date, most former nuclear power plant sites have been converted into another power plant or are sitting idle, often with spent nuclear fuel on site. However, a former nuclear power plant site in the town of Haddam, Connecticut, presents an alternative possibility: land conversion into a nature conservation area. We adopt theoretical vantage points of the geographical political economy literature to analyze the evolution of different discourses and actions relating to the former nuclear site, and examine why and how nuclear-to-nature conversion has gained momentum. The study reveals that the nuclear-to-nature proposition emerged as a political leverage to resolve conflicting interests over land reuse and spent nuclear fuel problems, which eventually engendered active local agency for land conservation. We argue that recognizing multiple articulations of space and associated agency is essential to understand the seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of nature and nuclear.

Keywords:

• Geographical political economy
• land use
• nuclear decommissioning
• nuclear energy
• United States

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank those who cooperated with our interviews and helped us in countless ways during the fieldwork in Haddam. We also thank Bill Meyer, Mallory Hart, Angelica Greco, Samto Wongso, Nicole Szczech, Sophia Ferrero, and the three anonymous reviewers for their assistance and feedback.

Notes

1. Other potential case study sites, Trojan (Oregon) and Big Rock Point (Michigan), have seen proposals for state parks in the past; however, little seems to have happened thus far since the original propositions. In 1999, Portland General Electric, the owner of the Trojan plant, proposed to donate most of its 634-acre land for a state park, but the process has stalled, except for the establishment of a 75-acre recreational park. In Michigan, a state agency proposed to purchase portions of the 450-acre property of the Big Rock Point plant, but Consumer Energy, then the owner of the plant, ultimately sold the plant to Entergy Co., and little progress has been made since.

2. DECON refers to a method of decommissioning in which buildings, structures, and portions of the facility containing radioactive contaminants are removed or decontaminated to a level that permits release of the site for unrestricted use. Other major methods include SAFSTOR (deferred dismantling) and ENTOMB (permanent encasement of the facility).

3. A Board of Selectmen is a common form of the executive arm of local town government in New England in the United States. The board typically consists of three or five members (three in Haddam), and the First Selectman is the head of the board, and is equivalent of a town mayor.

4. In 1998, the company, jointly with two other New England nuclear power plant companies (Maine Yankee and Yankee Rowe), sued the U.S. Department of Energy for the federal government’s failure to remove the spent fuel from their sites. In the recent phase of litigation filed in 2013, the companies were awarded $76.8 million in damages for the years 2009–2012 (Yankee Companies n.d.).

5. This conception of space is evidenced by the discourse to reevaluate the ISFSI site to generate more tax revenue; essentially, some local advocates reason that if no one wanted to have an ISFSI in their backyard, then such land must be highly scarce, and thus must attain high monetary value (Haddam Bulletin 2007).

6. In June 2003, CY announced the termination of its contract with Bechtel, after citing the company’s “history of incomplete and untimely performance and refusal to perform the remaining decommissioning tasks” (CY Today 2003, 1). In turn, Bechtel accused CY of not responding to its request to address extensive groundwater contamination (strontium and tritium) that it had discovered in 1999 by May 2001, under the mandate issued by the CT DEEP (Haddam Bulletin 2003). The dispute subsequently led to a three-year legal battle between CY and Bechtel (Overton 2006).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the SSRC Abe Fellowship and by the Colgate University Student Research Fellowship.